It's A Wonderful Torchwood Life
by Jooles34
Summary: This is based on the film "It's a Wonderful Life". Set at the end of End of Days in the unseen time when Jack is still dead. WARNINGS for discussions of suicide, some darkish themes and swearing


_Set at the end of End of Days in the unseen time when Jack is still dead. _

Owen takes a final glance around the Hub.

Gwen is still downstairs in the morgue on her piteous and pious vigil. It may work to help absolve her guilt, but Owen knows that there is no absolution for him. Ianto and Tosh are cleaning up the Hub, fractured and disturbed from the explosion they caused. Tosh has the air of someone who is still trying to process all that has happened and not quite believing it. On the other hand, Ianto carries himself with the feel of a man who knows exactly what has happened and is left dealing with the weight of consequence.

And Owen knows he is to blame for it all; he brought all this on them. He always has to know better; always has to get his own way. He had been blinded by his grief for Diane and was too focused on that to see anything else. And it had nearly destroyed the world. It _had_ destroyed Jack. The man who had saved him; helped him pick up the pieces after Katie had died and this is how he repaid him? By betraying him; killing him? Leaving him to die a second time?

He didn't deserve the life he'd lived and he didn't deserve to continue living it.

Owen retreats from the Hub, heading upwards and out. If anyone notices him go, they don't say anything.

Owen took a deep breath and let the cool air infuse his lungs. He looked down into the dark water and tried to imagine what it would feel like in his lungs instead of air. He knew drowning was not a pleasant or comfortable way to go, but the cold of the Channel water would help quicken it along. And it was no more than he deserved.

The plan was fully formed in his mind. He would walk around the Bay for a while; follow the spit of land that heads towards Penarth, splitting the Bay from the Bristol Channel. He'd go into the water at a quiet, dark spot where no one would see him. He'd wait for a place where the wall was high enough on the Channel side that there would be no way he could climb back up.

He started to walk, turning his collar up against the wind. He felt a peculiar sense of peace now he has made his decision; a certain knowledge that everyone would be better off without him.

His reverie was disturbed by a shout and splash to his right. Peering through the dark, Owen could pick out a figure splashing and struggling in the shallower water of the Bay.

"Help! Help me!"

"For fuck's sake," Owen muttered. But already he was pulling off his jacket and heading towards the woman's voice. Reaching the edge of the water he threw his jacket to the ground and kicked off his shoes. He waded into the water as far as he could and then started swimming, wondering how the woman had managed to fall this far out. She had stopped calling to him now, but was still splashing in the water.

Reaching her, he grabbed her face and looked at her. She blinked back at him. Assured that she didn't need immediate CPR, he turned her around and pulled her backwards, an arm around her chest, and swam them both back to the edge of the Bay.

He helped her to her feet and they both staggered out of the water.

"What the fuck was that about?" he asked her.

The woman was huddled in front of him and starting to shiver. Owen picked up his jacket from the ground and wrapped it around her shoulders.

"Come on, let's get you warm and dry before you die from hypothermia."

Owen stuck his feet back inside his shoes and wrapped an arm around her.

"There's a boat house back this way. We can dry off in there for a bit and I'll call my friends and they'll get you safe."

The woman nodded and the pair walked briskly up to the yacht club. Owen easily broke in through the main door. The woman rubbed her hands together.

"Ooo, it's chilly."

"You're soaking wet, of course you're cold."

"It's good luck for me you were there. Why were you there at this time of night?"

"Taking a walk," Owen said dismissively, looking around for something to warm them up.

"Oh, I don't think that's true, is it, Owen?"

Owen turned around and quietly considered the woman, who had a sceptical look on her face. She was pulling a cigarette out of a pack and Owen watched her raise it to her lips and light it. She took a drag, held the smoke for a second, then released it in a long stream, before tilting her head slightly and holding Owen's gaze.

"I think you were out there on your own for a very particular reason, weren't you?" she said.

"You know so much about it, you tell me." Owen leant back against a wall and folded his arms across his body.

"What makes you think I know anything?"

"Because I didn't tell you my name, you somehow have a dry packet of cigarettes even though I've just pulled you out of the Bay, and for that matter, both of us now have completely dry clothes. What planet are you from?"

The woman laughed. "Earth you idiot. Well, Newport, it's close enough."

"Then how is all this happening?"

"I'm an angel." She punctuated the statement with another stream of smoke.

Owen puffed out a dry laugh. "There's no such thing as angels."

"You believe in aliens, but you can't believe in angels?"

"I've seen aliens, I know they exist."

"And now you've seen an angel, so you can believe in us too now."

"Fuck off."

"Ah, you see I can't go anywhere. Not until we get you straightened out."

"I don't need straightening out," Owen said rather petulantly.

"You came out here to kill yourself."

"And what does that matter to you?"

"You're not meant to die yet; it's not your time. I've been sent to make sure you don't try again."

"Well, you can go back to wherever you came from and tell them you've spoken to me and tried your best."

"It's not that easy I'm afraid. I have some…issues to work out. I won't get my wings and be a proper angel until I've helped you."

"So, I matter so much that they have sent me half an angel? That's about bloody right."

"Oh, it's not like that. You're not denying you wanted to kill yourself tonight though."

"What's the point? Whoever, or whatever, you are, you already know."

"Do you really think you'd be better off dead?"

"The rest of the world would be better off without me. The world would be better off if I'd never been fucking born."

The woman had been stepping closer to Owen and was now within touching distance.

"Is that what you think? Is that what you really think?"

"Yes."

She moved closer still, getting in right in front of him. The smell of her and the Bay and cigarette smoke whirled around in Owen's head and made it difficult to think clearly.

"Is it though? What you really think?"

"Yes."

"Is it? Is it?"

"Yes!"

She was right in his face now. "Tell me!"

"YES! Yes, it is! I wish I had never been fucking born! The world would be a better place if I had never been fucking born," he yelled into her face.

The woman stepped back, dropped her cigarette on the floor and ground it out under her heel.

"Well, let's see." The woman smiled and stroked her hand gently down Owen's cheek. Involuntarily he closed his eyes into the touch and when he opened them again he was standing in a stark room, with pale green walls. There was a single bed in the room, a bookshelf stacked to overflowing with books in orderly rows and a chair facing the window.

Owen stared around him.

"Where are we?"

"Providence Park."

"The psychiatric hospital?"

"The one and the same."

"Is this where you're saying they'll send me?"

"Not you, no."

At that moment, the door opened and a young man walked in. Owen's jaw dropped.

"Ianto?"

The young man didn't respond at all.

"Ianto, Ianto!" Owen shouted at him again.

"He can't hear you Owen. You haven't been born, you don't exist. You've never existed. And this is what happens when you don't…haven't…didn't exist. This timey wimey stuff is tricky."

Owen watched as Ianto walked to the bookshelf and stroked his fingers along the leather-bound spines of a row of books. Then he moved to take a similar looking book and a pen from the bed-side table before heading to the chair by the window. He sat down, opened the book onto his lap and started to write.

Owen crossed the room and knelt down next to his chair.

"What's wrong with him? Why is he here? It can't have anything to do with me, we've never even got along."

"And that's exactly why he needed you in his life. Ianto's life went the way it was always supposed to. Torchwood One, the battle, bringing Lisa to Cardiff, being discovered, losing Lisa all over again. And the others tried, they really did, but Ianto was so broken by then, so alone. He couldn't cope with people's pity. You never gave him pity. Compassion when he needed it yes, but other than that you carried on as normal. You called him names, you took the piss, you annoyed him and bickered with him. You treated him like Ianto. And that was what kept him sane.

"Without you there he couldn't cope, started to crack around the edges. Jack did the only thing he thought he could do and retconned him, tried to get him into a new life. But you know as well as I do that retcon is a funny thing. Just too many of Ianto's memories were tied up in Torchwood and his mind couldn't handle it. They had no choice but to check him in here.

"They pay all his bills and see that he wants for nothing, but none of them can visit of course. His sister tries, but she has a young family of her own."

Owen leaned forward and looked at what Ianto was writing.

"He's writing about a Hoix. How can he know about them?"

"It's his dreams. Everything, the whole lot is still in his dreams. All he can do is sit here each day and write down what he sees in his dreams."

"So all that retcon and he still remembers? He still has the battle and losing Lisa and everything?"

"Yes. Only he has no way of understanding it or making any sense of it and it doesn't exactly make people think he's any less mad."

"It would be better if they took him back, let his memories come back to him fully and treat him from there."

"Spoken like a true doctor, Owen. Shame you're not there."

Before Owen had the chance to protest, the woman touched his cheek again and as Owen blinked he found himself in Gwen's flat. It looked…different.

Gwen was sitting on the sofa with a bottle of wine next to her and a pizza box on her lap.

"There's something wrong. This isn't right. Where's that Welsh idiot she lives with? Rhys or whatever his name is."

"He's long gone. She's on her own now."

"Well I know that can't be anything to do with me. I had an affair with Gwen. If anything their relationship would be better without me."

Another cigarette was flicked out of the packet and lit. Once alight it was pointed at him accusingly.

"That's the funny thing about love, Owen, it's not at all straight forward. When Gwen started at Torchwood it was all so horribly overwhelming and terrifying. And who did she have to speak to? It's not like she could take it home to Rhys. And then she started seeing you. All the frustrations from work were taken out on you…stop smirking, it's rather inappropriate for the situation.

"Anyway, not having an outlet meant that all the shit got taken home to Rhys and of course the poor boy didn't know what was going on. It didn't take long for the cracks to show and not too much longer for Rhys to decide he'd had enough and go."

"You're really telling me that by fucking Gwen I actually helped keep her relationship together?"

The woman smiled around a drag on her cigarette.

"Bloody hell. But Gwen isn't built to be on her own. She's a relationship kind of person."

"You're right. And just how easy is it to start a new relationship whilst working for Torchwood? She loses that Gwen-ness that made her Gwen, and with it that calming effect she had on Jack. She stopped caring and stopped making him care. And she got careless."

"Careless?"

"For someone like Gwen, not having someone to go home to makes the need to go home so much less important; less worth fighting for. And all because you weren't there for her to turn to when she needed someone."

"This is unfair. What you are doing to me is unfair."

"Shame we're not done yet then. Oh, but we're time travelling with this one. Brace yourself."

"What?" But before Owen got an answer the women touched him again and he was suddenly in another small room. He took a moment to look at the woman in front of him.

"Tosh? But what's she doing? What is she wearing?"

Toshiko Sato sat hunched over sewing machine, wearing a wraparound work apron with her hair pinned up.

"It's 1944. You weren't there to open the Rift and get Jack and Tosh back from 1941."

"She's been there all this time?"

"Nowhere else to go. Can you imagine what life was like for her? Not only adjusting to the way women were treated 60 years before her time, but being a Japanese woman during the war. She couldn't even get a job with the war effort. Jack did what he could, but he had to go and fight. Again. Tosh had to find her own way. She found someone who took pity on her and has given her a room to lodge in and work as a seamstress. But her mind; her brilliant, technical mind…" The woman trailed off with a sigh and lit another cigarette.

"And this is it? This is her life?"

"I'm afraid so. When Jack comes back to Wales, he returns the decorated war hero, one of the Air Force's shining stars. He does his best by her, he really tries. He even helps forge documents to try to get her into Torchwood. Turns out they are as bigoted as the rest of the world during that particular incarnation." The woman's voice is coloured with distaste.

"What happens to them, after the war?" Owen's voice is quiet.

"Jack can't stay in Cardiff, too much chance of running into himself. He had enough trouble ducking himself in the Air Force. And learning how to live as James Harper. So he and Tosh head to the country. They have a quiet, non-descript life, moving from place to place when people start to notice that Jack doesn't age. It's a life, but it's not the one she should have had, not the one she deserved. And it means that Jack never returns to Torchwood. He puts his life on hold for her."

"I can't watch her anymore. I want to go."

The woman looked at him and took pity on him.

"Come on then." she touched his face and Owen found himself standing on top of a car park in what looked like present day Cardiff, at night time.

"What are we doing here?"

"Look down there," the woman said, and pointed over the edge while lighting another cigarette.

Owen took a step forward and peered over the edge. He saw the broken body of a woman lying below, leg and back bent at unnatural angles, dirty blond hair matting with blood. He looked at the dead woman's face and back to the woman who was now standing next to him.

She sighed deeply and flicked ash down onto her body below.

"That's how I get to be here helping you. The purgatory stuff is made-up bollocks, but they do frown on suicide a bit. That's why they make you earn your wings."

"And what does this have to do with me, I don't even know you."

"If you'd been born you would have stopped me doing this. It's a few months down the line yet, but in the world where you are born and exist, I live. I don't have an easy life all the time, but I have a life and it has happiness in it. Around the pain there are bright, shining flashes of happiness. You help me live long enough to enjoy those again."

"So the person I go on to talk out of suicide, is talking me out of it."

The woman smiled at him. "Funny old world isn't it? Owen, you don't just matter to that one team of people. Your place in this world, your life, spreads so much further than you can imagine. You touch people, you save and heal them. You fix their broken bodies and at times you heal their broken hearts and minds too. The world needs you in it, Owen. _I_ need you in it."

Owen looked at the body on the ground again.

"I haven't even asked you your name."

"Maggie. Maggie Hopley."

Owen looked up at her. "Nice to meet you Maggie, Maggie Hopley. I think it might be time I went back."

"Back to the Bay, or back to the Hub?"

"The Hub."

Maggie took another drag on her cigarette and dropped it to the floor, grinding it out underfoot.

"Come on then, I'll do my magic angel thing and get you back where you belong. Now you will exist to save me this will be my last bit of angeling."

A moment later Owen found himself at the entrance to the tourist information centre.

"Is this goodbye then, Maggie?"

"Until you see me on that car park again. _You_ can save _me_ next time."

He turned and walked away from her, but she called after him.

"It won't always be easy, Owen, but there will be times it is all worth it."

Maggie smiled at him and Owen managed a small smile in return before disappearing through the wooden door. Maggie paused and looked up.

"I know I'm supposed to be done, but could you let me do this one last thing? You know, as I'm here and everything."

Another smile brightened Maggie's face and she vanished from the Plass.

The angel of Maggie Hopley, that will soon no longer be, appears in the Torchwood Three morgue. She keeps her physical form from view as the brunette she knows to be Gwen leans over Jack's body and places a kiss on his lips. Maggie watches her walk away and, making herself visible, leans over Jack herself.

"You really are quite a good looking guy aren't you? If only I wasn't going to be a married woman; no matter how briefly."

She leans forward and kisses Jack's forehead, stealing the death from his body. She pulls back as his eyes open and meet hers. Billions of years of life and death reflect themselves back at each other and he recognises her for what she is.

She gives him a half smile.

"Thank you," he says and she is gone.


End file.
